Xavier flew in from Israel for the trial. He waved to the mother a few times from the public gallery. She didn’t wave back. She didn’t seem to recognize her son.
The judge sentenced her to five years in prison. There were mitigating circumstances: her honorary membership in the Committee of Vigilant Parents, the wounds on her legs, her arms, her groin, and even her breasts.
In the penitentiary, the mother proved a model prisoner. She never complained, she ate well, she was always punctual, and she was polite to the female guards, all of whom she soon knew by name. She learned their birthdays by heart. Whenever a guard’s birthday came around, the mother always had a present for her. Usually something she had crocheted herself — a hot pad, a potholder, a table mat, an egg cozy. She spent a lot of time crocheting.
The only thing she didn’t do anymore was talk. Not about herself, not about her past. At unexpected moments, though, a smile would suddenly appear on her face. But that was more a nervous tic than an expression of happiness.
She signed up for a course in Italian. Just like You-Know-Who, she had a soft spot for Italians.
AS A POLITICAL SPEECHWRITER, Xavier developed unparalleled finesse, sensitivity, and playfulness. After two years of writing speeches for others, he himself became a Likud candidate for the municipal elections in Tel Aviv.
He possessed the ability to evoke emotions among the electorate. He spoke to the voters with a fire and a faith in the future that no other politician could equal. Xavier Radek had something they lacked. For him, passion was not a matter for irony. That much, at least, had become clear to Xavier: first came power, then came the comforting.
In order to comfort the Jews, he needed power.
“How do you do that?” the campaign manager asked. “Whip up the crowd like that? I thought politics didn’t appeal to the emotions anymore.”
“Communication is pain,” Xavier said. “Don’t ever forget that. If it doesn’t hurt, there’s no communication taking place. Don’t make promises. That doesn’t help. Everyone does that already. You have to tell them the truth. And truth is nothing but pain. They can only start to believe in it once it has become pain. That’s the secret of democracy.”
Because of Xavier’s ability to draw voters from various segments of the population, the party didn’t make a point of his private life.
His opponents tried to use it to their own advantage, but Xavier grew stronger with each attack. The voters didn’t want a leader without foibles. They wanted him to be one of them, or at least to be a man they could think of as being one of them.
Xavier knew there was no such thing as meaning. There was only pain without meaning. A politician’s job was fleshing out that pain. That was the temporary comfort he could offer his voters. He expressed their frustration, gave voice to their despair; he played upon their fears like an eleven-year-old Russian virtuoso at the keyboard. It was precisely Xavier — who felt nothing, who couldn’t feel anything anymore, for feeling was tantamount to falling — it was precisely Xavier who d simulated feeling so convincingly that his speeches were always attended by a few hundred people. Yet he was still nothing more than a candidate for the City Council.
He had made a habit of taking King David wherever he went. Each time, he told the same story. “My parents,” he said, “forgot to have me circumcised because they didn’t want to know who we were. But I discovered who I was, and I had myself circumcised, when I was almost seventeen. It cost me a testicle. And that testicle is my king. I call him King David.” And then, after a short pause: “King David can be your king, too.”
“Yes,” shouted voters from all walks of life, “make him our king, too!”
And they raised their voices in song. “Long live King David, King David, hai hai vekayam!” They lifted Xavier and his jar with the testicle in it onto their shoulders. They danced like that around the gym where the rally was being held. The electorate was waiting for a king.
Xavier was elected to the City Council of Tel Aviv.
But as his power grew, Xavier made enemies.
Not only the members of other parties were his enemies. His greatest enemies were within the ranks of his own party. And in order to combat them, he began assembling dossiers.
Water over the Desert
AFTER EIGHT YEARS in city politics, Xavier announced that he was going into national politics. He didn’t want to comfort a municipality, he wanted to comfort a nation, a people.
He appointed Awromele as his campaign manager. Never before had a checkout assistant been given the job of campaign manager. That created a lot of goodwill for Xavier, although in some ultra-Orthodox circles people spoke of nepotism.
Nothing is worse for a politician than to have everyone love him — for then, in fact, no one loves him. If he hungers after power, he must be contentious and controversial.
“Power,” Xavier told Awromele, “is the accumulation of missteps made by your opponents. Some of my opponents have not yet made any missteps. For them, we have to arrange a misstep. If they don’t make a misstep voluntarily, we have to help them.” And he went back to work on his enemies’ dossiers.
Occasionally he leaked something out to journalist friends who, in exchange for exclusive stories about his life, were willing to cite Xavier as an anonymous source.
“Look,” Xavier said to Awromele in bed one night. “It’s just a matter of reading between the lines. Study their speeches, study their draft legislation, study the marks they’ve made, you’ll always find a weak spot somewhere. And then you have to apply deconstruction to that. You deconstruct what they’ve said, what they’ve done, what they’ve proposed, what they’ve believed in or claimed to believe in, until that weak spot spreads across their entire career like an oil slick. It’s like tennis — you have to help your opponent make a mistake, let your opponent beat himself. No one made a greater contribution to the death of communism than Stalin.”
Xavier hired six assistants whose work consisted solely of passing along his opponents’ weak spots to the media. They were willing to go through fire and water for Xavier. They praised his energy, his charisma, his belief that things couldn’t go on like this, that a great of deal of work remained to be done.
Xavier realized that the voter was nothing but meaningless pain, pain to which a leader had to lend meaning. He who accepts that all truth is pain need not shrink from accepting power. He knows power like the back of his hand.
One by one, systematically, and with an unerring sense of timing, Xavier eliminated his enemies, until only one remained.
That was Jossi Dolav. He, too, wanted to be the leader of the Likud Party. Xavier despised Dolav, but that was nothing personal, it was part of his job. Jossi Dolav had started out as a lawyer and, after some idealistic ramblings, had become a professional politician. He had a family and a mustache. Xavier invited him to the bar at the Dan Hotel, close to the beach, where they could talk undisturbed.
“Jossi,” Xavier said, after inquiring in detail after his wife and children, “Jossi, you’re an intelligent person, a nice person. You’re a credit to the party — you would be a credit to any party. That’s why I’m pleased that you’ve chosen our party.”
Jossi Dolav smiled. Like so many people, he was fond of compliments, especially when they came from someone like Xavier, who, though younger than he, was very well respected.
Xavier put a few peanuts in his mouth. Then he remembered that he didn’t really like peanuts, and pulled a plastic bag of sunflower seeds out of his pocket. He cracked the shells deftly and ate the contents with amazing speed. Amid the cracking of shells, he told Jossi Dolav: “Jossi, you want something that I want. That’s bad for you, that’s bad for me, and ultimately it’s bad for the party. Withdraw your candidacy and I’ll make sure you’re richly rewarded — after the elections, of course, which I will win. An attractive and responsible post as minister in my Cabinet. I leave it up to you. I’m a generous person, you know that. If you like to travel, I’ll make you minister of foreign affairs. If you prefer to take it easy and you like a nice massage now and then, I’ll make you minister of tourism. Just tell me, you know how I am, I’m as good as my word.”